Igor Stravinsky is often considered something of a revolutionary, in part based on the riotous reception of his ballet The Rite of Spring (see separate article).

Stravinsky came from a musical family, although his training was limited, reflecting his family's desire that he pursue studies in law.

Stravinsky then reverted to the task of finishing a short opera based on the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Nightingale, which he had started in 1908-09 but which had been interrupted by the commission of The Firebird.

Stravinsky first sketched that passage, "Augurs of Spring," in the summer of 1911, in the Polish-Russian countryside, and finished it in a rented room in the Swiss village of Clarens.

Stravinsky’s new music and new rhetoric set off a feeding frenzy that exceeded even the fuss over the "Rite." A second stream of twentieth-century music—a kind of tonal modernism—flowed out from him, and single pieces of his inspired entire careers.

Stravinsky prospers in other surroundings: in festivals, such as Lincoln Center’s and Carnegie’s this season; on recordings, where conductors such as Tilson Thomas and Riccardo Chailly have brought Stravinsky performance to a radiant level; and, most important, at the ballet, where his music is fleshed out by dancers.

www.therestisnoise.com /2004/05/stravinsky.html (5278 words)

Internet Public Library: Music History 102(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)

Stravinsky began studying with the famous Russian composer in 1903, and after Rimsky's death in 1908, never had another teacher.

Stravinsky applied his imagination and the energetic rhythms of The Rite of Spring to the choral work Les Noces (The Wedding), a piece scored for only four pianos, percussion, and voices.

It was an amazing creative outburst, and for many people Stravinsky's reputation as one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century depends on these three scores more than on the remainder of his large output.

Stravinsky had for some while been thinking of writing a ballet on an episode in Greek mythology and decided to centre it on Apollo, leader of the muses, reducing their number from nine to three.

Balanchine, too, later said Stravinsky's music was "white on white." Certainly it is the clarity, calm, even serenity, of that music, for strings along, which makes it seem almost infinitely remote from the excitements of the earlier ballets.

Technically this is what Stravinsky does: he begins with a series of identical chords in the strings--32 chords in all--moving in a strict and steady rhythm of eighth notes.

What Stravinsky does here, making sure that no great or jarring differences of strong and weak are heard in the sounds, is deeply akin to how rhythm is in the Gregorian Chant, and may have been influenced by it.

Stravinsky was one of the most consciously philosophic of composers, and there is a statement of his, from his book, The Poetics of Music, that is beautiful.

Arguably Stravinsky's most important work, arguably his best, and at the time of its composition arguably the most shockingly controversial work the musical world had yet seen, Stravinsky's ballet about pagan Russia caused quite a stir in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees at its premiere in 1913.

www.music.eku.edu /faculty/nelson/mus755/stravinsky.html (1402 words)

Stravinsky's Rite of Spring(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)

Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, completed in 1912 for Diaghiler's Ballets Russes, is a synthesis of the new ideas in musical thought which had begun to take shape with Debussy only a few years earlier.

It is Stravinsky's new combinations of existing styles, as well as some of his own stylistic contributions, that give The Rite of Spring its strong, unique personality.

The contrast between the way Stravinskyorchestrates the chord (EM triad underneath Eb7) and the way Debussy would likely have handled the same chord is quite sharp.

Stravinsky felt uncomfortable with the direction and almost immediately turned again, searching for a sparer music.

Stravinsky wrote music with the craft of a fine jeweler.

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Stravinsky's orchestral music includes symphonies, suites from some of the ballets, and two suites arranged from sets of easy piano pieces.

Stravinsky's chamber music includes some arrangements of orchestral works, in particular two versions of music from Pulcinella, one for violin and piano and a second for cello and piano, under the title Suite italienne.

In 1992, Carr began studying Stravinsky’sneoclassical ballets and operas on Greek subjects, four works that had been neglected by Stravinsky scholars; the primary sources for these works were unavailable until 1986, when the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, opened Stravinsky’s papers to researchers.

After studying Stravinsky’s writings and examining the syllabic patterns used in Greek poetry, Carr concluded that much of Stravinsky’s inspiration for composing these works came from the sounds and rhythms of his collaborators’ written text.

The final versions of Stravinsky’s works no longer cause riots: He is now recognized as one of music’s greatest innovators of the 20th century, and is sometimes called the musical counterpart to Picasso.

In 1919 Sergei Diaghilev, the impressario of the Ballets Russes whose collaborations with Stravinsky, including The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, had brought the composer to international prominence, approached him with a new project: a ballet based on music by the eighteenth-century composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, with set designs by Pablo Picasso.

Far from substantially recomposing the music, Stravinsky approached the material with a light hand, scoring the ballet for a scaled-down orchestra that nicely mimics the clarity of the pre-Classical style.

In his monumental study of the early Stravinsky, Richard Taruskin attributes these winking gestures to what he calls the composer's "Turanian" style, a style reflecting "the land of Stravinsky's musical imagining," where a self-consciously Russian, or at least eastern aesthetic works to undermine the certainties of the Western musical tradition.

In it, Stravinsky enforced his unique re-interpretation of the twelve tone method, retaining all the Stravinskian signatures that are found throughout his compositions, whether they be "primitive", "neo-classic", or "serial": rhythmic quirkiness and experimentation, harmonic ingenuity, and a deft ear for masterful orchestration.

Stravinsky was in several cities, including Lausanne (where his son was born), Beaulieu, St. Petersburg and Rome.

While composing the last scene for the ballet, Stravinsky fell ill in February of 1911 with nicotine poisoning, and did not finish the music until May. The actual score was not finished until a few weeks before opening night.

Stravinsky had to do much of the piano playing during rehearsals, dye to the fact that no one else could play his music.

A year later (1911), Stravinsky's second ballet, Petrushka, was performed, and Stravinsky was hailed as a modern master.

When his third ballet, The Rite of Spring, had its premiere in Paris in 1913, a riot erupted in the audience--spectators were shocked and outraged by its pagan primitivism, harsh dissonance, percussiveness, and pounding rhythms--but it too was recognized as a masterpiece and influenced composers all over the world.

"Stravinsky's extensive output includes compositions of almost every kind, for voices, instruments, and the stage; and his innovations in rhythm, harmony, and tone color had an enormous influence on twentieth-century music.

Igor Fydorovich Stravinsky was born on 17 June 1882 at Oranienbaum on the Gulf of Finland opposite Kronstadt and near St Petersburg, Russia.

In late 1930s Stravinsky was tired of old Europe: another war was imminent, his wife and one daughter had died of tuberculosis, and French critics who violently attacked him for andquotLe Sacre du printemps" (calling it andquotLe Massacre du printemps") were now complaining about his new neo-classical style.

Gradually Stravinsky began to use the twelve-tone system resulting in the astonishing work andquotAgon" (1957) (agon in Greek means andquotcontest") in which Stravinsky combined tradition and modernity.

Stravinsky wasn't a fundamentalist convert like today's period-instrument performers who pore over original Bach manuscripts to discover the composer's original intentions, and try not to be influenced by later interpretations of the scores.

Stravinsky's first extended Neoclassial work - and he never used that label - was the 1919 comic ballet ``Pulcinella.'' Impressario Sergei Diaghiiev asked Stravinsky to fashion a ballet from pieces by the 18th-century composer Giovanni Pergolesi.

Born in 1882 in a small town near St. Petersburg, Stravinsky's early exposure to music came from his father who was a bass in the Russian Imperial Opera.

Although Stravinsky initially embarked on a career in law, his studies were eclipsed by his activity as a composer when he began studying composition with the famous Russian nationalist composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

In 1909 Stravinsky was introduced to Sergei Diaghilev who, impressed with the young man's musical potential, invited Stravinsky to orchestrate some piano works by Chopin as ballet music.

Stravinsky's unpredictable individualism and originality precluded the formation of a school of composition, but the influence of his music has been widespread, ranging from Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostakovich to Darius Milhaud, Aaron Copland, and many others.

Igor Stravinsky is often considered something of a revolutionary, in part based on the riotous reception of his ballet The Rite of Spring.

Stravinsky was commissioned to write a ballet for the theater, his Firebird.

Stravinsky continued his association with Paris, but with the advent of World War I and the turmoil in Russia that would lead to the October Revolution, Stravinsky took refuge in Switzerland.

www.essentialsofmusic.com /composer/stravinsky.html (809 words)

Igor Stravinsky and the Pianola(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)

Pianolas were well-known in Russia before the revolution, but it seems likely that Stravinsky first became aware of their real musical potential in Berlin in late 1912, where he joined Diaghilev's Ballets Russes on tour, for the opening of "Petrushka" on 4 December.

Since Stravinsky had sold the exclusive rights of "Les Noces" to Diaghilev for a three-year period beginning in 1920, he had to abandon his ideal instrumentation in favour of the final version for four pianos and percussion.

In 1924, Stravinsky's contract with Pleyel was acquired by the Aeolian Company in New York, and in January 1925 the composer travelled to America for a concert tour, and to record some piano rolls for the Duo-Art system.